Blog - Page 64
A collection of 2,474 blog posts
One of the coolest perks we have at Buffer team is that all team members (and their family members!) get a free Kindle and all the Kindle books they want to read—any book, anytime, no questions asked. As a result, we end up reading a wide assortment of stuff—from popular and critically-acclaimed fiction to resources that help us build better products or improve ourselves in some way. As a team, we read 1074 books in 2015—a 63.7% increase from last year’s total of 656 books. (Of course, the te
There’s often a critical time (or two) in a business’s journey when it’s make or break and time is at a premium. There’re often times beyond this, once a brand is established, where time is still scarce and efficiency is the name of the game. The team at Smart Pension has felt both sides of this in the past couple years and has experienced the time crunch particularly on the social media side (sound familiar at all with your experience?). One of the UK’s leading pension companies, the Smart Pe
We have some very exciting news to share in this month’s investor update: we’ve acquired Respondly, a social media customer service and brand monitoring tool! With this move, we will reposition Buffer in the coming months to be a full social media solution for companies across both customer service and marketing departments. Read on for more on this and all the other news from November… Overall key metrics * 2,921,380 total registered users (+2.8%) * 220,988 monthly active users (-2.5%)
We’ve talked about how important of a tool video is becoming for marketers. Every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube, Facebook has 8 billion daily video views and Snapchat users watch 6 billion videos daily. Video views are growing so fast that if you don’t jump in now, you might miss out on one of the biggest opportunities for you and/or your company. And that’s why I wanted to talk about Twitter video, which is something not a lot of marketers have embraced yet! Let’
I have some great news: Buffer has acquired Respondly, a social media customer service and brand monitoring tool! We’re excited to bring this product into the Buffer family and move into a whole new market that many of you have been encouraging us to explore for years. I wanted to take a little time to share the full details about how we came to acquire this product and our overall vision for how we’ll grow our social media offerings to help you to deliver great experiences and results on soci
I am no good at a lot of social media things … which is a bit tough to admit as a social media marketer! I don’t use a smartphone. I’m scared of Snapchat. I’m not entirely sure what WhatsApp does. I can think of 50 social media things (and probably more) where I could improve. The things I am good at—mostly the things that Buffer helps me with, like scheduling, consistency, stats, analysis—make for a solid foundation, and I’m keen to make strides on the rest. Step one: Admitting ’em all! I h
How much time do you spend creating a social media image? Two minutes? Twenty minutes? An hour or more? I’ve done it all! I’ve been down those rabbit holes when you suddenly realize that you’ve been searching for the perfect picture or agonizing over the best font for forty-five minutes (yikes!). We know that social images are important but they can also be really time consuming. That’s why we created Pablo [h
The Buffer team is more than 65 people right now, which means our startup has more than doubled in size this year. It’s been an incredibly exciting adventure! There are a lot of big factors for this growth, as well as many changes for all of us that have gone along with it. We recently sat down for a video chat with Buffer: Open’s Content Crafter, Courtney, to talk about why and how we’ve grown so much this year. She asked us some great and tough questions about things like the challenges of
The Seattle Times—and many publishers like them—is in an interesting place. There’s zero difficulty in coming up with outstanding, high-quality content to share. The opposite problem is the case: Of the 160+ stories the Times publishes every day, which ones warrant a share on social media, where there are only two dozen or so slots to go around? Beyond the publisher-specific quirks of content, The Seattle Times is also solving puzzles that face any number of social media marketers, no matter
Who isn’t busy these days? Everyone always seems in a constant rush to their next appointment, even toddlers. And of course, on our way to those meetings we need to stay up-to-date on our email, share with the rest of the world through Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, while we also try to catch up on… oh, a new email just came in. So much to do, so little time. The 40-hour workweek is expanding, but our energy isn’t In the USA, working harder is the assumed solution for most profess
Social media is hard! And building an audience even harder! (We even wrote about it !) Hard does not mean impossible and it certainly doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have fun along the way nor try and make the process as painless as possible. That’s where a social media calendar comes in… I know you weren’t expecting that! ? Well ok maybe it’s not the answer to everything, but it can certainly help you get a better handle on things and remove some
I am quite possibly the world’s biggest fan of being comfortable. The word, to me, conjures up an image of a big comfy couch, a roaring fireplace, and maybe a sleepy puppy to curl up with. What could be better? So it has been a challenging, repeated lesson for me to learn that feeling uncomfortable is pretty much the only way to experience real personal growth. I didn’t want to believe this for much of my life, and I often still rail against it now. But more and more often, I’m learning to le
Whether you want to learn more about A/B testing, conversion rate optimization, content marketing or paid ads, there’s a wealth of marketing knowledge being shared online every day. Today I’m excited to share 43 of the best websites to learn something new about marketing. These websites will teach you practically anything you’d like to learn. Ready to dive in and pick up something new? Let’s go! Company Blogs Unbounce The Unbounce blog offers expert advice on landing page and conversion opti
I was catching up with our team’s messages on Discourse recently when I came across a unique message thread. It wasn’t about trial numbers, FAQs or monthly recurring revenue . It was about empathy. Empathy feels so crucial to the Buffer culture, and yet the word doesn’t appear anywhere in our values right now. Maybe
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. – Anne Lamott This quote from Anne Lamott resonates with me quite a bit. I seldom know what I’m doing until I’ve done it. I also seldom know what other writers are doing either. I recognize what I enjoy reading … aaaaand I’ve little idea why I enjoy it. That’s what makes the topic of linguistics and language so fascinating to me because it helps explain all the whys behind the writing I love, the tweets I read, the upda
Hi there! Buffer has evolved a lot since we wrote this blog post back in 2015. Some of the content and screenshots are now out-of-date. Check out the new-and-improved Buffer at buffer.com. We do not often write articles focused on Buffer here on the social blog, but we wanted to try something different this time around and hope you will find it useful! If you are already using Buffer to share on Social Media (THANK YOU!!) and are looking for some tiny tweaks that could make the experience bett
Whether you’re a startup, a small business, an agency, or a brand, there’s always such value to be had in going to the drawing board with social media marketing. Setting a mission. Defining goals. Choosing the tools and workflows that’ll get you there. Campaign Monitor, a simple email marketing solution for businesses and professionals, has taken this bottom-up approach to building a social strategy. And we’re honored to share how they’ve done it. Campaign Monitor is a fast-growing, industr
At this exact moment, I have 16 tabs open in my browser. How about you? With the full power of the internet at our disposal, it can be pretty easy to waste precious moments navigating to the…let’s say, less-than-productive corners of the web. I’m as guilty of this as anyone—I’ve even shared extensively how often I get sucked into Facebook! So it’s great that there are quite a few folks out there focused on helping us keep track of what really matters as we surf the web. There’s a particularl
It’s easy to feel like you can grow a loyal audience in no time using the latest growth hacks or Twitter and Facebook tricks. But the truth is, it’s not that simple. Growing an audience is hard. You have to have talent. You have to put in a lot of work. And there’s no 1–2–3 solution. In this post, I’m happy to share some of our experiences from building an audience at Buffer alongside six key ingredients to successfully building an audience. Let’s get started! Why it’s difficult to build
Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Learn more about the latest formula and see all the team’s current salaries here. It’s been over 2 years since we first shared our transparent salary formula; we’ve been truly blown away by the response we’ve seen. It’s been incredible to see how many companies have adopted our formula or a similar open formula, and it’s a privilege to be a small part of the larger conversation around pay transp
If you search for information on how Facebook’s Newsfeed algorithm treats posts from 3rd party publishing apps, you’ll find plenty of content suggesting that reach and engagement will be lower through 3rd party posting. As a subject very close to our hearts here at Buffer, we wanted to dive in and share our own thoughts and experiences in this area. The TL;DR version, is that posts from 3rd tools are not penalized and will perform just as well as posts shared natively to Facebook. If you’d li
I’ll be the first to admit it: When I first got hooked on the idea of startups, the goal in my mind was monetary. I wanted to be “financially free” so that I could do all the things I wanted to do but was unable to do due to money. So my first startup was a “big idea.” It could change the world (or at least I thought so), and I would be rewarded enormously for what I would do — given time. After trying a few different ways in order to reach the success I had in mind, I realized that I was unh
October was an unusual month for us, numbers-wise, as a result of us moving from 7-day to 30- day trials of Buffer for Business. Here’s more about that and everything else going on at Buffer in our October 2015 investors’ report. Key metrics * 2,841,519 total registered users (+3.0%) * 226,445 monthly active users (+3.0%) * 55,460 average daily active users (+2.0%) * $650,478 monthly recurring revenue (+1.0%) * $7.81M annual recurring revenue (+1.0%) * $2,546,589 cash in bank * 56 team
Nowadays, in order to grow an audience on social media, it’s not as simple as just posting when you feel like it. Audiences have become more sophisticated over time and as a result it is important to have some sort of social media strategy. In order to start implementing that strategy, a schedule is a must for a lot of businesses. A sharing schedule can help you double your traffic and provide your audience with consistent and valuable information that will make them more likely to follow and